water and electric
lights and a dining-car ahead. It is a great thing to have seen a
country in the pioneer stage of its existence.

In that portion of Southern Albania known as North Epirus we motored for
an entire day through a region dotted with what had been, apparently,
fairly prosperous towns and villages but which are now heaps of
fire-blackened ruins. This wholesale devastation, I was informed to my
astonishment, was the work of the Greeks, who, at about the time the
Germans were horrifying the civilized world by their conduct in
Belgium, were doing precisely the same thing, it is said, but on a far
more extensive scale, in Albania. As a result of these atrocities,
perpetrated by a so-called Christian and professedly civilized nation, a
large number of Albanian towns and villages were destroyed by fire or
dynamite. Though I have been unable to obtain any reliable figures, the
consensus of opinion among the Albanians, the French and Italian
officials, and the American missionaries and relief workers with whom I
talked is that between 10,000 and 12,000 men, women, and children were
shot, bayoneted, or burned to death, at least double that number died
from exposure and starvation, and an enormous number--I have heard the
figure placed as high as 200,000--were rendered homeless. The stories
which I heard of the treatment to which the Albanian women were
subjected are so revolting as to be unprintable. We spent a night at
Ljaskoviki (also spelled Gliascovichi, Leskovik and Liascovik),
three-quarters of which had been destroyed. Out of a population which, I
was told, originally numbered about 8,000, only 1,200 remain.

[Illustration: THE HEAD MEN OF LJASKOVIKI, ALBANIA, WAITING TO BID MAJOR
AND MRS. POWELL FAREWELL]

Though the great majority of the victims were Mohammedans, the
outrages were not directly due to religious causes but were inspired
mainly by greed for territory. When, upon the erection of Albania into
an independent kingdom in 1913, the Greeks were ordered by the Powers to
withdraw from North Epirus, on which they had been steadily encroaching
and which they had come to look upon as inalienably their own, they are
reported to have begun a systematic series of outrages upon the civil
population of the region for which a fitting parallel can be found only
in the Turkish massacres in Armenia or the horrors of Bolshevik rule in
Russia. In their determination to secure Southern Albania for
themselves, th